To Free a Good Man
by Markus Ramikin
Summary: Tal Rasha hasn't lost his mind to the Lord of Destruction yet. The runic wards on his prison will contain Baal, but not the uncorrupted Tal Rasha if he were to choose to leave, so he must be guarded. [Oneshot. Perhaps slightly AU.]


"Come no closer", Tal Rasha said from within his prison.

The Horadrim monk shook his head, approaching the edge of the outer wards, right outside the bridge which extended over the chasm around the obelisk to which the host of Baal was chained. He had left his torch in a nearby holder, and now the light limned him from behind.

The chamber was cold.

"This can go in two ways, my Lord Tal Rasha", he said. "One is that you resist as long as you can. I devise schemes to free you from your suffering, and you thwart them. And every time you do, a part of you hopes that you fail, and is disappointed when you don't. Every time that part gets bigger, and when I finally free you, you are a half-broken man, hating yourself because of the relief that you feel."

"You will never free me."

Both of them knew there were two rings of wards between them. One was a passive defense that maintained the chains and prevented Baal from leaving. The other was connected directly to Tal Rasha, serving to warn him of nearby presences, and as an active defense.

The wards charged slowly when first laid down, but by now they were quite potent, and still increasing in potency. They had been designed to gain new layers of strength from the prisoner's suffering, from the deterioration of his willpower and sanity - and he suffered much, and constantly.

"Or it can go like this: I tell you of one immensely important fact, known to me but not to you. As a consequence you realize, of your own free will, that it would serve the Light better for you to step out of your prison. Then you leave this place as a strong and unbroken champion of the Light, and help us with the greatest threat of this day and age."

The genius of that setup was that the active wards were attuned to Tal Rasha's pure mind. The more Baal subjugated him - which he had known from the beginning was inevitable - the more they became independent. Once Tal Rasha's will and self were completely drained, these wards would belong to no-one - and they would be too strong for anyone but an already freed member of the Three to break them, or a group of the highest archangels. Then the Horadrim could safely seal the tomb.

"Oh?" Tal Rasha's eventual response was almost bored, though after all this time he was starved for conversation. "What is this 'fact'? And what is the 'threat'?"

"They are one and the same", said the Horadric brother sadly. "Baal is already free."

Tal Rasha looked down at the monk in enraged contempt. "I feel him in my chest, every second of the day! I do not sleep because he is there, I do not dream of anything but containing him, because he is there!" The mage breathed hard at the end, the outburst exhausting him briefly. Finally, he calmed down, and added, "Even for a servant of lies, you could do better than that."

"It is a simulacrum you feel, a lesser soulstone, containing Toth, one of the more powerful demons of corruption. The real Lord of Destruction would have overpowered your will long ago, but he was never here, not from the very start. Did you really think you had the strength of will, the endurance, the purity, to contain such a being for four thousand years?"

"Try again. Yes, I figured others have probably guessed that I've lost track of time. I'm still not going to believe it's been more than, oh, I don't know, five years. The wards still being under my control are proof of this."

"Are they? You lie, my lord Tal Rasha, when you say you do not sleep, even if the wards wake you up when anyone approaches. Tell me of your dreams. The ones where the man with the hooded face tells you of what's been happening to the world in these past centuries. The destruction, the evil, the corrupting influence of not only Baal, but the entire Three."

The old wizard's eyes widened briefly. He contained himself, but he was truly unsettled the first time in this conversation. "They're just dreams."

"You know who the man is, my Lord."

Silence fell.

The silence lasted for a long time.

One of the men was comfortable in the silence. The other, to his own surprise, was not.

"Tyrael", whispered Tal Rasha finally. The whisper echoed through the cold chamber until there was again silence.

"The Archangel Tyrael", the monk finally confirmed. "Our true leader. The world is not in a state which would permit him to interact with us any more, except in our sleep. Darkness has fallen, the Pandemonium Fortress is lost, and the High Heavens are isolated from us. All of us dream these dreams, the same as you, but none here have the strength of the old Horadrim, strength like yours, to oppose the Three and their servants. There are magics hiding this place and a few others like it, but they will not last forever either. We _must_ open a way for the angelic hosts again, as you once did in the past, before these last refuges fall and all that is good is extinguished from the world."

"I'm not going to tell you how. If you are what you pretend to be, you shouldn't need me to."

"And I don't. I already know how. I would not survive the attempt. I'm among the best of our order, and I can only light fourteen lightstones", the monk said.

Every Horadrim mage had been tested by the fifty lightstones - it was the standard test of magical power. Each of the devices required 15% more power to ignite than the previous one.

Tal Rasha was a thirty seven. The weakest full Horadrim mage in his time had been a twelve.

"Fourteen? How did you get so weak? What have you been doing?"

The monk knew that Tal Rasha meant not him personally, but the magical societies of the world.

"Being culled."

"Culled..."

"When the people with the strongest magical blood keep dying in these wars without first leaving enough descendants... Our predecessors reversed the celibacy rules for active agents too late, and we'll be a long time recovering."

"There were no celibacy laws in my time."

"No, there weren't", the other man said with quiet seriousness. "Not in your time."

* * *

The conversation continued.

It took many, many hours of back and forth arguments, recountings, explanations, interspersed with stubborn silence. It was as if the monk needed sleep just as little as Tal Rasha did.

Then there was the briefest moment of indecision, of hesitation, of a weakening in the inner wards, a moment where the confused Tal Rasha was too slow in reacting, as the monk stepped forward, reached for the soulstone, and pulled it out of the old mage's chest.

The prison runes, requiring the stone to function, flared briefly, and died.

The smug smile of the liar was the last thing Tal Rasha saw. The flood of the Lord of Destruction's undeniable will was the last thing Tal Rasha felt as his body was taken over, and he knew the price of wavering.

Soon, the world would know it too.

* * *

"Don't!"

A scream tore the silence in a mage's sleeping cell.

A man woke in sweat, and realized the scream had been his own. The scene he'd just seen... this place bred nightmares like that, but this one felt just too real. Too prophetic.

Within minutes the man was making his way down the cold, winding corridors down to Tal Rasha's chamber, wand in one hand, sword in the other. He picked up a torch on the way, held it together with the sword. He called on no reinforcements, because he was the only one living in the underground complex. If there were any intruders trying to free Tal Rasha, they would be his to deal with.

He thanked the Heavens that his order chose not to seal the chamber until the wards became fully autonomic, and installed him as a guard while Tal Rasha's independent will still survived, the will whose slow death was fuelling the wards, but which, while still alive, had the power to lower them.

The mage saw that the former leader of his order was still there, imprisoned, as he should be. The outer wards told him no one else had been in the chamber.

The Horadrim sheathed his sword and wand. His heart was still beating too fast. He placed his torch in a nearby holder.

Doubt came to him. The world was safe today, perhaps, but in future could Tal Rasha be persuaded to drop his guard as easily as he had seen in his dream? Surely not. And yet... The monk's head swam, thoughts running slowly as if through thick honey, his heartbeat resonating dully in his head. He felt an insatiable surge of curiosity. It was curiosity that his mentors noted was his greatest strength, his highest motivation that made him so good at his studies - so powerful.

"Come no closer", Tal Rasha said from within his prison.

The Horadric monk found himself shaking his head, since he hadn't been walking towards the prisoner at all. But wait... why was he suddenly so close, almost on the bridge? When had he closed the distance to now stand within a step of the prison wards? His mind observed his own doings as if still watching a dream, the curiosity gaining a detached quality. His mouth moved, and sound came out, and he had nothing to do with it. How strange.

"This can go in two ways", were the words that passed through his lips. Then some more words spilled out.

Four hooded figures watched from the doorway. Two rushed forward, ran up to the monk to grab him by the arms and pull him back. Screams and sounds of struggle filled the chamber.

Of the remaining two, one spoke to the other.

"It is as you predicted, lord Tyrael."

"Your brother has had enough in this place. Replace him."

"Yes, my Lord", the man said, and drew a knife.


End file.
